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Epilogue
- The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press
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Epilogue Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow, but in dreaming, precipitates its awakening. Walter Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century” To write or read a history of nightlife in a metropolis and a time caught up in a violent and tumultuous whirlwind of war, revolution, and nation-building seems in some respects as frivolous today as cabaret-going did to those Chinese nationalists of the age who were engaged in a life-or-death struggle over the fate of their country. Why bring a handful of pearls and baubles up to the surface when we could participate in raising the skeletons of the drowned, or even the entire sunken ship?1 Why should we be writing about dancing (or reading about it) when we could do the same thing about the heroes who fought this War of Resistance valiantly, expelt the invaders, and built the modern Chinese nation? It is certainly a great privilege and a wonderful indulgence to explore the world of nightclubs in Old Shanghai, ignoring the surrounding countryside engulfed in the flames of battle and uprisings, not to mention the lives of the underclass in the city itself—the lumpenproletariat whose sad and destitute lives Mu Shiying depicts so well if so fleetingly in his short story “Shanghai Foxtrot.” These people could never have afforded to set foot in even the lower-class dance halls of the city, let alone the famous Paramount ballroom. Yet paradoxically, we emerge from our nightlife experience with a deeper knowledge of the era and a better understanding of the complex and contradictory features of those very conflicts out of which Chinese nationhood arose. The endeavors of Chinese elites in Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s to compete with Westerners in building their own ultramodern (e.g., Paramount ) or “Chinese”-style (e.g., Metropole) ballrooms and investing them with their own cultural identities as both Chinese and stylish cosmopolitan Shanghai.indb 285 2010/5/11 11:49:23 AM 286 · Shanghai’s Dancing World urbanites; the attempts of cabaret hostesses, customers, and staff members to carry out an underground contest between pro- and anti-Japanese forces in the late 1930s and early 1940s; the efforts of thousands of cabaret workers in the late 1940s to preserve their jobs and their dying industry in the wake of government intervention, culminating in the Dancers’ Uprising of 1948; and the efforts of those same workers and patrons to adjust to the harsh strictures of the new society in the 1950s, all reveal how completely their world was in fact invested in the political culture of war, revolution, and nation-building that characterized the history of China as a whole. Thus, having investigated the dreamworld of modernity that found its quintessence in the posh ballrooms of the city’s golden age, we become even more aware of the dimensions of the catastrophe that the planet tumbled into as the First World War of the early twentieth century begat the great revolutions that precipitated the Second World War, which then led to the Cold War. It was a bitter century indeed, a time of decadence and disaster as certain nations sought to expand their influence, crush old empires and build new ones, but also an era containing the seeds of renewal and rebirth. Could the sparks be found in the jazz cabarets of Shanghai during the interwar and wartime decades? Perhaps. For a brief spell, the complex world of Shanghai society forgot its divisions and lost itself in the collective dreamdance of modernity. Dancing has always been a part of humanity, and it may even be one of the fundamental behaviors that make us human.2 It brings together disparate groups of people large and small, allowing them to connect emotionally and cope with traumas that beset societies, thus helping to maintain and preserve the social fabric. In a period and in a city in which those bonds were constantly stressed and threatened to be torn apart, dancing to the rhythms of jazz music was one of the simple acts that kept people together in time. Unsurprisingly, this activity achieved such popularity and became so enshrined in the mass culture of the age. Little wonder as well that when the CCP took control over the city in 1949, they regarded jazz music and its associated dancing styles as a danger to the order they wished to create. After all, it was a national one that ruthlessly categorized people into classes...